George Soros

Soros was born on August 12, 1930, in Budapest, Hungary, into a Jewish family; his father was a lawyer.⁠[1][2][3]

During the German occupation of Hungary in 1944–1945, more than 500,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered; the Soros family survived by securing false identity papers and concealing their backgrounds, and helped others do the same. His father bought the family forged papers and bribed an official, who then claimed Soros was his Christian godson. Soros later called 1944 his formative experience, recalling of his family, “not only did we survive, but we managed to help others.”⁠[2][2][3][4][4]

As the Communists consolidated power in postwar Hungary, Soros left Budapest in 1947 for London, where he worked part-time as a railway porter and a night-club waiter while studying at, and graduating from, the London School of Economics (LSE). At the LSE he encountered the ideas of the philosopher Karl Popper; in Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper argues that no philosophy or ideology is the final arbiter of truth, and this idea of an “open society” later became the source of the name and work of his foundations.⁠[2][5][2][2]

After graduating, he worked as a trainee at the British investment bank Singer and Friedlander, where he began to gain experience with stock markets.⁠[1][1]

In 1956, Soros moved to New York, where he worked as an analyst of European securities and as an arbitrage trader at firms including Wertheim & Co., F.M. Mayer, and Arnhold & S. Bleichroeder; he became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1961.⁠[2][5][1][1]

In 1967, Soros became a director of a new offshore fund of Arnhold & S. Bleichroeder. In 1969, he started the Double Eagle Fund for the firm with $4 million in capital, $250,000 of it his own money; the fund was registered on Curaçao in the Netherlands Antilles, which freed it from U.S. capital gains taxes and most federal regulations, and none of its investors could be Americans except Soros himself. The fund traded in all financial markets, including stocks, bonds, currencies, and commodities.⁠[5][5][5][5][5]

Soros launched his own hedge fund, Soros Fund Management, in 1970. In 1973, he and his assistant Jim Rogers left Bleichroeder to run it independently as a private partnership, which initially had only one employee, a secretary; the management team reserved 20 percent of the fund’s profits for itself, with Soros receiving four-fifths and Rogers one-fifth.⁠[2][5][5]

In a period of rising inflation and oil shortages, Soros’s readiness to sell stocks short enabled the fund to far outstrip the typical mutual fund; in 1975 he told The Wall Street Journal, “We start with the assumption that the stock market is always wrong.” Between the beginning of 1969 and the end of 1974, the fund roughly tripled in value, while the Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 3.4 percent.⁠[5][5][5]

In 1979, the fund was renamed the Quantum Fund. Between the end of 1969 and the end of 1980, it gained 3,365 percent in value, compared with 47 percent for the Standard & Poor’s composite index; at the end of 1980 the fund was worth $381 million, and Rogers left the firm that year. The cover story of the June 1981 issue of Institutional Investor called Soros “the world’s greatest money manager.”⁠[5][5][5][5]

Also in 1979, Soros began his philanthropic work, funding scholarships for Black university students in apartheid South Africa and for dissidents in communist Eastern Europe to study in the West.⁠[6]

1981 was Soros Fund Management’s worst year: fund shares fell 22.9 percent, mainly because Soros, mistakenly thinking interest rates had peaked, took a heavy position in bonds; it was also the fund’s only losing year until 1996. During what he later called an “identity crisis,” investors withdrew one-third of the fund’s assets; in September of that year he cut his staff to a few aides and turned over active management of most of the Quantum Fund to outside personnel, concentrating himself on macro analysis.⁠[5][5][5][5][5]

In 1984, Soros opened a foundation in Hungary, which would eventually lead to the Open Society Foundations network. The foundation sought to expand people’s access to information in Eastern Europe and Russia, including by distributing photocopiers to independent groups to break the Communist Party’s grip on information. That same year, Soros returned to active investing.⁠[6][6][5]

In 1985, Soros aggressively leveraged the Quantum Fund, taking positions worth more than its entire assets on his belief that the German mark and the Japanese yen would rise against the U.S. dollar; the fund rose 122 percent that year and its assets passed $1 billion, reaching $1.5 billion by the end of 1986.⁠[5][5][5]

In 1986, Soros opened another foundation in China, which became a target for in-fighting between pro- and anti-reform elements in the Communist Party and closed in 1989.⁠[6][6]

On October 19, 1987, Soros’s first book, The Alchemy of Finance, was published, setting out his theory of “reflexivity.” He explained to Byron Wien that the prevailing wisdom is that markets are always right, while he takes the opposite position and assumes that markets are always wrong.⁠[7][5][5]

In the Wall Street crash that same month, Soros was caught unprepared and decided to sell large amounts of the Quantum Fund’s futures contracts; the market quickly rebounded, and the fund lost $200 million in a single day and at least $350 million in all, but still ended the year up 14 percent.⁠[5][5][5]

Increasingly absorbed in the political changes in Eastern Europe, Soros again withdrew from active management. Stanley Druckenmiller, hired in 1988, took over the chief management role at the Quantum Fund the following year, with Soros as “coach.” Between 1989 and 1993, under Druckenmiller, the fund averaged annual gains of 40 percent in net asset value. As the fund grew, Soros established further funds, including the Quasar International Fund (1991) and the Quantum Emerging Growth Fund and Quota Fund (1992).⁠[5][5][5][5][5]

By the fall of the Berlin Wall, Open Society had established a presence in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia, and over the next five years it built a network of offices in Albania, the Baltic States, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere. In 1991, Central European University, championed and largely funded by Soros, opened in Budapest with just over 100 students in its first intake.⁠[6][6][6][7]

In 1992, the Quantum Fund borrowed £5 billion and exchanged it for German marks, judging that Britain could not keep its promise to hold the pound’s rate in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism because doing so would require raising interest rates to a level that would throw the economy into deep recession. On September 16, the Bank of England announced interest rate increases twice that day but still failed to support the pound, and at 7 p.m. Chancellor Norman Lamont announced that Britain would leave the Exchange Rate Mechanism; the day became known as “Black Wednesday.” The Quantum Fund made at least $1 billion betting against the pound, and Soros thus became known as “the man who broke the Bank of England.”⁠[5][5][8][8][8][8][8][5][3]

As the collapse of the Soviet Union left its research institutions in crisis, Soros launched the International Science Foundation in 1993, providing $200 million in interim emergency support; over two years, more than 30,000 scientists received individual grants. In the same period, the Open Society Foundations launched a $100 million early childhood education initiative in 15 former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and sent disaster relief specialists into besieged Sarajevo to help restore gas, drinking water, and electricity.⁠[6][6][6][6][6]

After the end of apartheid, the Open Society Foundations’ office in South Africa turned to legal reform, education, public health, and independent media, spending more than $150 million there over the next 25 years; Soros separately pledged $50 million in 1995 to help the South African government build housing for people living in makeshift shacks. In the same period, the foundations launched the Lindesmith Center to promote drug policy reform (it became part of the Drug Policy Alliance in 2000) and funded the $45 million Project on Death in America to improve end-of-life care in the United States. In 1996, the foundations formally established a U.S. Program focused on racial discrimination and mass incarceration in the justice system, reproductive rights, and immigration policy.⁠[6][6][6][6][6][6][6]

In the summer of 1997, when the currencies of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Korea came under speculative attack, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad accused Soros and other money managers of deliberately destabilizing Asian regimes. Soros replied that his funds had made only minor trades in Southeast Asian currencies over the previous two months; Druckenmiller said Quantum had indeed sold the Thai and Malaysian currencies short, but in the early spring, before the crisis.⁠[5][5][5]

That same year, Soros Fund Management was reorganized as a limited liability company with a three-man management committee of Soros, Druckenmiller, and chief administrative officer Gary Gladstein.⁠[5]

Soros Fund Management had begun actively investing in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in 1994, and by the fall of 1997 more than $2.5 billion was invested in Russian businesses. In Russia’s 1998 financial crisis, stocks plunged 80 percent and the firm lost most of its investment there, though the Quantum Fund still ended the year up 12.4 percent. In the summer of that year, the firm’s six funds had about $21.5 billion in gross assets.⁠[5][5][5][5][5]

On December 20, 2002, a Paris court found Soros guilty of insider trading for using inside information about a botched 1988 corporate raid on Société Générale to make $2 million on its shares, and fined him €2.2 million. Soros denied the allegations and was not in court; his lawyers argued that the case was too old to judge. Soros lost his appeal to France’s highest appeals court, the Cour de cassation, which upheld the conviction but quashed the fine.⁠[9][9][9][9][10]

On January 12, 2004, Soros said in a speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that he had made rejection of the “Bush doctrine” the central project of his life for the coming year, and that the 2004 election was a referendum on the “Bush doctrine.” He had already given $10 million to America Coming Together, which campaigns to increase voter participation, and $2.5 million to MoveOn.org, an internet campaign group that opposed the war in Iraq.⁠[11][11][11][11][11]

The Center for Responsive Politics found that Soros gave more than $23 million to MoveOn.org and other 527 groups during the 2004 election cycle; in a 2006 NPR interview, he estimated the figure himself at $27.5 million.⁠[12][12]

Soros filed a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights over his French insider trading conviction. In September 2010, the court agreed to rule on it on the written record without a hearing. In October 2011, the court ruled 4–3 that France had not violated the European Convention on Human Rights: the majority held that, although Soros was the first person in France to be prosecuted for this offense without any professional or contractual relationship with the target company, given his status and experience he should have been particularly prudent.⁠[10][10][13][13][13]

In July 2011, Soros announced that he would manage money only for himself and his family, returning roughly $1 billion to outside investors by the end of the year and turning Soros Fund Management into a family office; the sum was only a small portion of the roughly $25 billion he oversaw. The letter to investors cited impending industry regulation as the reason: the Dodd-Frank Act required hedge funds to register with regulators, while family offices were treated more leniently. Keith Anderson, chief investment officer since 2008, left the firm as a result.⁠[14][14][14][14][14][14]

In 2017, Hungary passed a law popularly called “Lex CEU,” which required foreign-registered universities operating in Hungary to also offer courses in the countries where their courses and diplomas are accredited; Central European University awarded diplomas accredited in both the United States and Hungary but did not then teach in the United States.⁠[15][15]

In October 2017, the Open Society Foundations announced that Soros had transferred $18 billion to the foundations, bringing his total giving to them since 1984 to over $32 billion; after the transfer, the Open Society Foundations became the second-largest grant-making philanthropy in the United States, after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Earlier that year, Soros Fund Management had hired former UBS asset management executive Dawn Fitzpatrick as chief investment officer.⁠[4][16][16][16]

In May 2018, the Open Society Foundations announced that it would move its Budapest-based international operations and staff to Berlin, citing an increasingly repressive political environment in Hungary and security concerns for its personnel. A month later, the Hungarian parliament passed a legislative package called the “Stop Soros” bill, which allows for the imprisonment of anyone aiding undocumented migrants.⁠[15][6][15]

On October 25, 2018, Central European University president Michael Ignatieff announced that, because the Hungarian government had said it would not sign the agreement the two sides had negotiated, the school could not operate legally in Hungary as a U.S.-accredited institution and would move most of its programs to Vienna; Hungarian government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs called the announcement a “Soros-style political ploy.”⁠[15][15][15][15][15]

In October 2018, Florida man Cesar Altieri Sayoc mailed 16 improvised explosive devices containing explosive powder from fireworks, shards of glass, and pool chemicals to targets including George Soros, former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and CNN; all of the devices were recovered between October 22 and November 2. Sayoc pleaded guilty on March 21, 2019, and on August 5 of that year was sentenced by the federal court in the Southern District of New York to 20 years in prison.⁠[17][17][17][17][17][17][17]

That same year, Soros was named the Financial Times 2018 Person of the Year for championing democracy.⁠[4]

In January 2022, Soros put $125 million into the super PAC Democracy PAC to support candidates and causes in the 2022 midterm elections and beyond. Soros created the PAC in 2019 to help influence the 2020 election; in a statement he said the money would provide long-term support for pro-democracy causes and candidates “regardless of political party,” covering voting rights, civic participation, civil rights, and the rule of law. His son Alexander Soros serves as the PAC’s president.⁠[18][18][18][18][18]

In December 2022, the board of the Open Society Foundations elected Soros’s son Alex Soros as its chairman, succeeding his father. In June 2023, Soros handed control of his $25 billion “empire” to Alex Soros, news that became public on June 11 through an exclusive interview with Alex in The Wall Street Journal; Alex is also the only family member on the investment committee overseeing Soros Fund Management.⁠[19][19][19]

The foundations then restructured, announcing layoffs of as much as 40 percent of staff and a new operating model; on March 11, 2024, they announced that vice president Binaifer Nowrojee would succeed Mark Malloch-Brown as president, and Soros said in a statement that the foundations’ global ambition had thereby been fulfilled.⁠[20][20][20]

On January 4, 2025, President Joe Biden awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, to Soros and others at the White House, recognizing his lifetime of work advancing open society, democracy, and human rights; Alex Soros accepted the medal on his father’s behalf. Soros said in a statement, “As an immigrant who found freedom and prosperity in America, I am deeply moved by this honor.”⁠[21][4][21][21]

On Monday, September 22, 2025, Aakash Singh, a senior official in the office of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, sent a directive to U.S. attorney’s offices in at least seven states to prepare to launch investigations into the Open Society Foundations, listing possible charges including material support to terrorism, arson, wire fraud, and racketeering. Earlier, Trump had said in a Fox News interview that Soros should be investigated for racketeering.⁠[22][22][22][22]

Attorney General Pam Bondi declined to confirm whether an investigation was underway, saying only that “everything’s on the table”; the Open Society Foundations issued a statement strongly rejecting the allegations, saying its work is solely dedicated to strengthening democracy and upholding constitutional freedoms and that “our activities are peaceful and lawful.”⁠[23][23][23][23]

In September 2026, Forbes published its tally of lifetime giving by members of the Forbes 400: Soros said he had given $24.2 billion to organizations in the United States and other countries, equal to 74% of his net worth, making him the most generous member of the list relative to his wealth for the seventh consecutive year. He was one of 13 people that year to receive the top philanthropy score of 5 (having given 20% or more of their wealth).⁠[24][24][24][24][24][24][24][3]

Soros is known for macro analysis, focusing on world politics and its effects on monetary policy as well as changes in inflation, interest rates, and exchange rates; his theory of “reflexivity” holds that there is no such thing as a perfect market, because the people who created all systems and strategies are inherently flawed. He managed client money in New York from 1969 to 2011. By a 1995 calculation, $1,000 invested with him in 1969 would have grown to about $2.15 million with all dividends reinvested.⁠[5][1][3][5]

He has published 15 books on investing, economics, globalization, philanthropy, and open society, including The Alchemy of Finance (1987), Soros on Soros (1995), The Crisis of Global Capitalism (1998), The Bubble of American Supremacy (2004), The New Paradigm for Financial Markets (2008), The Tragedy of the European Union (2014), and In Defense of Open Society (2019).⁠[7][7][7][7][7][7][7]

The Open Society Foundations are a network of foundations, partners, and projects in more than 100 countries, funding freedom of expression, accountable government, and justice, and paying school and university fees for students who would otherwise be excluded from opportunities because of their identity or where they live; its grantees include groups representing Europe’s Roma people and other marginalized groups such as drug users, sex workers, and LGBTI people. Soros was an early critic of the “war on drugs,” calling it “arguably more harmful than the drug problem itself,” helped kick-start America’s medical marijuana movement, and from the early 2000s became a vocal backer of same-sex marriage. He has also funded independent organizations such as Global Witness, the International Crisis Group, the European Council on Foreign Relations, and the Institute for New Economic Thinking.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2]

Soros has received honorary doctorates from Yale, Oxford, and Corvinus University of Budapest, among others, and was elected an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy. As of October 2026, now in his 90s, he continues to take an interest in the foundations’ work, and the Open Society Foundations still list him as founder.⁠[4][4][4][4]

Soros has long been one of the U.S. Democratic Party’s biggest donors, giving more than $200 million to candidates and PACs over the past decade; in the 2016 election, he was also a large contributor to the super PAC backing Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.⁠[3][16]

Because of his funding of liberal causes, Soros has become a target for conservative and right-wing groups. A 2018 analysis by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) found that far-right circles often recast his philanthropy as conspiracy theories about manipulating global events, many of which draw on the old antisemitic notion that “rich and powerful Jews work behind the scenes, plotting to control countries”; Hungary’s Orbán government has attacked Soros for years, claiming that he seeks to undermine Hungary’s national ethos. The ADL argued that, even when those spreading such claims do not intend antisemitism, casting a Jewish individual as a puppet master who manipulates national events for malign purposes has the effect of mainstreaming antisemitic tropes.⁠[25][25][25][25][25]

George Soros: Official website: https://www.georgesoros.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]

Soros Fund Management: Official website: https://sorosfundmgmt.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[26]

Open Society Foundations: Official website: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4]

X: Public account: https://x.com/georgesoros (opens in a new window)⁠[27]